Dr. Mark Kris on Performance Status in Lung Cancer

Mark G. Kris, MD, chief of the Thoracic Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the importance of accurately determining a patient's performance status.

Kris says that there are so many things involved in the care of a lung cancer patient that it may be easy to forget to determine their performance status.

Physicians must ask a patient what activities they can and cannot do, whether or not they can go to work and should not visually "estimate" answers. As a part of the assessment of performance status, the get-up-and-go test is extremely telling. The get-up-and-go test requires a patient to stand up from a chair, walk 10 feet, turn around, walk back to the chair and sit down. A physician can hone in on the patient's performance status based on whether he or she took 10 seconds or more to complete the task.